American Koreans

October 18, 2015

The choir isn't Daeshin choir, it's like four different branches combined. So I don't have to play piano for that, but I do play piano each week in Sacrament meeting. 

Honestly, the visit to Nampo and Busan tower was kind of boring. It was fun, but just too expensive to be worth doing anything. It was five bucks just to go up the tower...yeah right  I can see the exact same view just by hiking up the mountain a little ways, which I do anyways because the houses and roads go up the side of the mountain. I'll send you some pictures though :)

I don't have any new stories about KHC . . . I think he got tired of trying to tell us that we are wrong, because he suddenly stopped contacting us after that last appointment a couple weeks ago.

Sorry, I haven't written a letter yet, no time, but if I have time, I will write one for sure :)

Yesterday in Sacrament meeting, we had 17 people in attendance, like double what it normally is. I don't know if I told you, but there was an inactive member of the branch who passed away a couple weeks ago, and so her son and his family came from Provo to visit, and came to Sacrament yesterday. It was really weird talking to Koreans who talk and act like Americans, it kind of threw me off :)  

I don't have anything that I need, but I really enjoyed that popcorn you sent :) I do have one request though, hold off on the ties. I have way too many, and you can buy them here for like five bucks anyway :) thank you!

Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Hines

Elders Hines & Lee; Sisters Yang & Nielsen

Busan Tower

General Conference

October 11, 2015

​This week we have been really busy, and have had almost no free time. Just since the missionaries do everything here, we've been trying to get things ready for people to watch General Conference at the church, cleaning the church, and then Daeshin Grandma had a ton of errands for us to. But anyway, general conference was really good, but we haven't watched all of it yet. Yesterday we had to go to choir practice in the afternoon, so tonight we are going to watch the Sunday afternoon session. I don't understand why we had choir practice during general conference...for some reason a lot of the members in Korea don't seem to think that it's very important. No one came to the church on Saturday to watch it, and on Sunday a lot of people left after the morning session.

 

Sorry, I'm just really not in the mood for typing a long email today, but I'll tell you one story from this week. It's with Kim Hyeon-Cheol, the guy who is trying to convert us. My new companion thought it was really entertaining. He like took us out to eat, shared his conversion story with us, and bore his testimony even. I feel like an investigator when we meet him. Then we went to his church with him, where he showed us episode two of seven preacher videos that are two hours each. I tried asking if it was okay if we shared something about are beliefs since we haven't been able to yet, and they just said that we can after we watch the videos. So basically they have no interest. After the video ended, we kind of got into a Bible bash with them. They think that the Garden of Eden and heaven are the same place, that Adam and Eve were happy in the garden, and because they partook of the fruit, we can't be happy. And then the infamous scripture at the very end of Revelations that says if anyone adds to this book, God will curse them.  Nothing they said made any sense, but they wouldn't listen to anything we said. There is a scripture in Deuteronomy that says the exact same, so if that means what they say it means, then all of the NT is a lie. But they just denied everything we told them. There's no way we can teach them anything in that kind of environment. My companion and I talked about it, and we're going to try and meet one or two more times and see what happens, but we will probably be avoiding them in the future.

The last two weeks for p day we had the fitness day and transfer meeting, so we couldn't do anything. This week we are going to go to Nampo and Busan Tower with the district.

Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Hines

Fruit or Vegetable?

October 5, 2015

Dear Family,

Everything is going really well here. We just started a new transfer. My old companion, Elder Seo, left and went to Haeundae, Busan, and is my zone leader now. So that is kind of fun. My new companion is Lee Hak-gon, he is from Seoul, and the area he just came from is Tongyeong, my training area. So that is really fun too, we've already talked about it a lot, especially how awesome LYH is :)

I heard about General Conference news like the morning of. President Barrow send out a text announcing who the new apostles are. Something interesting that he told us is that we should not only pray for the new apostles being called, but also for their families. The reason being is that when a member of your family gets called to be a prophet, it can be really hard because they are just normal people to you and you know all of their weaknesses. So sustaining them can be difficult. I've never really thought about that before, so that was really interesting.

Thanks for the conference review, I can't wait to watch it. It feels so nerdy, but as a missionary, GC is one of the most exciting things ever. It makes me wonder if I will feel the same way when I get home :)

Oh, and thanks for telling me the Chinese animal thing. Don't worry about being a pig, at least in Korean (maybe in China too) pigs are good luck. Sometimes Koreans say "Dream of pigs," as a way of saying goodnight. And if you have a dream about pigs it means that something good is going to happen to you soon. As far as dad being a goat, I think he's just out of luck, I don't think there's any upside to that... :)

We had a 'Potluck Party' for English class on Saturday for Elder Seo and Sister Kim since they were both leaving. We played jeopardy together, and one of the questions was "Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?" just as a fairly easy question under the science column. It wasn't quite as easy as we expected. Koreans are thoroughly convinced that tomatoes are vegetables. You know that it's a fruit, right? Or is it just me? Anyway, the only Korean who agreed with me was my companion. One of the people there tried to argue with me, and when I asked him how you tell the difference between a fruit and a vegetable, he said that fruit grow on trees. I asked him what about grapes and watermelon, as well as tons of others. He kind of hesitated, and then said that the real way you can tell is how you eat it. Fruit you just eat plain, but you use vegetables as an ingredient with other foods. But the funny thing is that Koreans eat tomatoes plain way more often than Americans do. Not to mention, if that were true, that means that humans can change the nature of fruits and vegetables, just by how we use them. So just start putting strawberries in your lasagna, and it will become a vegetable. Cool, huh? I never would have guessed.

The best part of being a missionary is being able to devote all my time and energy to one thing, and not have to worry about anything else. And also knowing that the one thing that is your focus is the best thing you could be doing.

Have a great week!

Love,
Elder Hines

**Tomatoes are a fruit. Fruits contain the seed of the plant, which means cucumbers, bell peppers and pumpkins are also fruit.** 

Chuseok

September 28, 2015

When I first got here, everyone was hard for me to understand, and with old people I couldn't understand anything. But now I can understand most of what younger people say (depending on the topic, of course) and a decent amount of what older people say.  I can understand a lot of what Daeshin Grandma says, but there are still some older people who I can barely understand at all. A lot of it has to do with how Korean is a language that changes really quickly, and so because of that, the older someone is, the harder it is to understand them because they use older-style Korean. It's really interesting, Korean changes way faster than English. Most Koreans can't understand books written in Korean only 100 to 200 years ago.

So we met with that guy at his church, but we weren't able to show him the Restoration video. At his church they have a room with a big TV in it that they use for proselyting, and we were going to use that to show him the video.  But he ended up showing his proselyting video to us first, and it was like two hours long, so we weren't able to even finish that. It was just a guy giving a talk about what was basically the plan of salvation, but missing a lot of stuff, and a couple things were different that is expected in other Christian religions, like the nature of God. So I guess he is trying to convert us, so we'll see how it goes. There weren't really any arguments, we've been trying to avoid that :)  He just kept asking us throughout the video if there was anything we were uncomfortable with. Not quite sure how to answer that, because you can tell that he just wants to argue. We're definitely going to try and keep meeting him though, because each time we met him he has brought someone else with him to help, this time it was another member of his church, a man maybe mid-20s. So this is turning out to be a really good opportunity to introduce the gospel to lots of people, just indirectly.

We didn't do much for Chuseok, but today the branch president's daughter is taking us to a buffet for lunch, and she said it is for Chuseok. She is a super nice lady, like 29 I think, she served a mission in Daejeon, and then moved to the US after that. But she felt like she needed to come back for some reason, so she did, and now she is a huge help to this branch.

For fitness day we could either run a 5K or 10K, and so I did the 5K since I'm a missionary and really out of shape. It almost killed me too, I'm pretty sore today. So in one of the areas in my district there is Lord of the Rings Risk at the church, so we went and played that with the Yeongdo elders, which was probably the highlight of my mission. It was probably the biggest adrenaline rush I've had in over a year. I guess that's what happens when you're deprived of entertainment for so long. I'll mostly like come home and laugh at things like Leave it to Beaver. That'll be embarrassing...

I'm sure other things happened this week, but I can't really remember, and I'm running out of email time. I hope you have a great week!

Love,

Elder Hines

Mission Fitness Day

Spam gift packs for Chuseok

Cool Korean spider

Exchange with Elder Hofheins